


stabat

by Victoryindeath2



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [258]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst and Feels, Brothers, Caranthir as always loves Mae very much, Caranthir has a sentimental soul and I love him very much, Catholicism, Family Feels, Gen, Maedhros is awake at last and Caranthir holds his own sort of vigil, holding on by a prayer, is it a gold rush au fic if there is no angst, sickbed visitation, title from the hymn Stabat Mater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25438153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoryindeath2/pseuds/Victoryindeath2
Summary: Caranthir visits his brother. He isn't much, but he brings with him two things of great importance: steady love and a small sack of treasures.(all I ask of thee to give)
Relationships: Caranthir | Morifinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [258]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23





	stabat

When he was a boy—nothing more than a thunder-grumble, following after the bright flashes of his brothers—Caranthir had owned a little molasses-brown book to write his numbers in. He kept it tucked under his pillow, because Maitimo had given it to him inscribed with a doggerel and a miniature sketch that somehow made his square face a little less brick-like.

Back then, Maitimo kept his charcoal kind, though he spent no effort on himself.

Now, the charcoal is gone. So is much else.

_Nine minus one minus one minus two equals five, unless you are talking about people, who usually divide at least in half over loss, so taking that into account, the answer lands somewhere between two and three._

_Anything after this can only be a tendency toward zero—unless a higher power chooses to act._

The grief-plain math has lived for some time in Caranthir’s head, lived there until the miraculous reversal. Throughout one last night of waiting, he dreams of it and wakes to check the count. When he can sleep no more, he begins to rummage through his brothers’ things.

Outside, past ugly stone walls, sentries, and a bridge that cannot be burnt, there is the rising winter sun, but _here_ is a very quiet door on the other side of which lies Maitimo, whom Caranthir has seen already even though he thought—they all thought—he was dead months ago.

A bad six months in Mithrim, but it was worse elsewhere. Obviously.

He is not expected in the sickroom, nor was he sent, though Maglor had promised the night before in a few discouraging words.

 _Not now, Amras. He is overcome_. Maglor had stood as though his eroded figure would be any sort of barrier between his now-youngest-brother and the room behind. The hallway wobbled in candlelight, and so did everything else. Voices and shoulders and memories.

(Maitimo used to dress them up and call them by the names of brave old Irish heroes—a thought that aches a little too sharply in the chest, as when Curufin used to dig in with pointed sticks., and does still with pointed words.)

Enough _. Now_ has come for Caranthir, or he has come for it. Drawing a deep breath, he opens the door, one hand clutching the bunched up brown sack of treasures it took him too long to recover. Maybe he’s less a thief for being one twice.

Maitimo lies stiff upon the bed, just as Caranthir last saw him, not iron so much as an old tree, the one back—the one that splintered in a storm, fell half across the stream bank, and sank suffocating in mud. His eyes pinch in what might be sleep, if it weren’t for the tight curl of his fist upon the softest wool covers Mithrim could provide.

Not much is soft in Mithrim—can’t be. Hearts nor skin nor ground. One grave was enough.

(Two, there should be two dug in the field, to place sad wildflowers by in the spring, but there will not be three.)

“Caranthir?”

Fingon is here, of course. Maitimo’s other _cano_ after Maglor. Hair crow-dark as Caranthir’s, presence more necessary.

(Being a doctor—being the only reason _Maitimo_ is present in this god-forsaken fort and not dying in some god-forsaken mountain—he must be thanked, someday.)

Caranthir’s uncle is also here, settled quietly in a chair, shoulder slanting towards his eldest nephew. He looks up from brushing the cover of a dark tattered Bible with his thumb, and though he also seems surprised, he transforms Fingon’s question into a greeting with a solemn nod.

Neither of them will throw him out, probably, but they might try to speak, and Caranthir has no ears for them at present, let alone a tongue.

Someone grunts—one of Maitimo’s dark-weather friends, sitting in a corner with a mortar and pestle, grinding up some sort of weed. He looks as though he’d like to grind up Caranthir as well, judging by his scowl, but he’ll have to wait.

When Fingon had spoken, Maitimo’s brow had twitched, and his hand (the only one) had flattened itself out.

So, ignoring his growling instinct to retreat from a room filled with so many people not his own, Caranthir takes a step forward. He lifts the sack to explain his intrusion, but when he tries to say his brother’s name, it sticks somewhere in his throat, all mangled up between past and present.

Still, not dead.

“I’ve brought your things,” Caranthir says in a rush as he approaches the sickbed, wishing his boots could make a little less noise. His voice is also too loud, and Fingon shushes him.

Red-faced—but when is he not—Caranthir looks down at his long, long-lost brother, who appears as dried up and brittle as an autumn cornstalk, every inch of visible skin scorched pale under his bruises. Pale and _almost_ lifeless. Touch him, and he’d crumble away.

Caranthir will keep from kissing his forehead, though he wants to very much.

(It is not the right time, or company.)

 _(Still, be tender. Be_ him _, not you.)_

“My things?” 

Caranthir almost collapses at the knees, struck as much by the fractured voice as by the broken-mirror-wrongness in the grey eyes. Struck also by the way the face is—despite its abuse—the same face that Caranthir knew when Athair died, when Mother left, when the most terrible thing in the world was living the greater part of the year in a rambling farmhouse without a brilliant older brother to pull the sun from the sky.

“Caranthir,” Maitimo sighs, and Caranthir must speak before the lump in his throat gets too big to breathe around. He is a child again, before the one who never over-looked him—there is too much love there that he had to pack away as in a box, with not a soul to watch.

(He’d wondered, on very bad days, when he had to shut himself up in a dust-dense, closet-like shed of bent rakes and things, if that—that Bauglir fellow would have had the decency to use a coffin. He never liked his own answer.)

“We split them,” he says roughly, trying to look at _Maitimo_ , and not the scar cutting across his brother’s nose. “Celegorm was the only one who could fit your clothes. You already have those back, except for one shirt he wore straight through. I’m sorry I couldn’t mend it.”

“If it was well-used,” Maitimo says in a low voice, “I can hardly complain.”

A ruined shirt does seem the least of his brother’s worries, but Caranthir still prickles with guilt. He reaches his hand into the sack and closes his fingers about Maitimo’s comb. It used to be Mother’s. _Mamaí’s_. He doesn’t take it out.

Maitimo’s hair has been washed and detangled since last Caranthir saw him.

“Do you have anything useful?” Fingon cuts in like a scalpel, not just with his words but with his nose, which pokes around Caranthir’s shoulder as he tries to get a glimpse of the simple treasures he brought.

“No.” Caranthir just stops himself from bringing his elbow up sharply.

Fingolfin murmurs something which Caranthir does not quite catch, but immediately Fingon moves away.

“None of it is useful,” Caranthir continues, talking only to Maitimo. “Still, it is yours, and you should have it within reach. I mean, you should have everything you want.”

Caranthir actually means he wants Maitimo to feel like he is back home, and safe, but he can’t find a way to say that without sounding stupid. This isn’t home, because all the people that make up home are not here, and the remaining few allow grief to hunt them into separate corners, their blood seeping out in ugly tears or poisonous words.

Caranthir is tired of both.

Maitimo lives.

“Here.” He withdraws each item from the little bag, showing it off before returning it to hiding. The hunting knife, which Amras never used, the deep emerald rosary which Caranthir had never been able to complete a decade on, and the deck of cards, which Caranthir had obtained only after a short, snappish interrogation of its possessor.

“Curufin took those,” he says about the cards. It is somehow important that Maitimo knows Curufin needed a keepsake too.

Someone clears their throat—the ex-thrall, whose name, Caranthir believes, is Gwindor.

He stubbornly doesn’t turn his head, even though he realizes too late that Curufin might have had good reason to at first deny his request for the deck. Card games require dexterity, require two hands, and Caranthir, in his blind bull-headed eagerness to piece Maitimo back together, forgot the function of simple subtraction. He wonders if it would be advisable to apologize, or to fall straight to bashing his head against the wall.

Before he can come to a conclusion, however, Maitimo speaks, gentle as the day he discovered Caranthir with a box of paints.

“And you took the rosary?”

Caranthir nods.

He stays a good while, longer than he thought he or anyone else could bear. It is easier when Fingon leaves to fetch some herbal tea. Fingolfin bows his grey head over his Bible, either in meditation or in sleep, and Gwindor, though he does not seem to approve of Caranthir, makes no sound or motion that cannot be ignored.

There is a second chair in the room—for Fingon’s use no doubt, seeing as it is tucked up against a table sprawled over with doctor-like tools and clean, pressed bandages—but Caranthir does not fetch it, though no one has said he could not. Instead, he kneels at his brother’s bedside, resting on his heels.

Maitimo does not look straight at him again, but Caranthir does not mind, indeed returns the favor. He hosts a small war within himself, if he should be silent till Maitimo is not, or if it would be cruel to say any number of the things shuffling about in his heart.

Finally, just when he settles on a simple _I’ve missed you very much_ , Maitimo hesitantly asks how Mithrim has fared. Or rather, he asks after Caranthir, and Caranthir isn’t very good at talking about himself, so he jerks the conversation in other directions as soon as possible.

“I’m right enough, now you’re here,” he says, and then he relays the fort’s recent history in plain terms, hurrying past moments of turmoil as if they were nothing.

“We’ve been running things ourselves, since Rumil died. Him and Ulfang.”

Maitimo flinches a little at that. Of course, he would not know.

Caranthir manages a level tone, manages to plod on, turning over the past in vague but neat rows. “Ulfang was no good after all, but don’t worry about that, can’t hurt anyone where he’s gone. Maglor’s been in charge since then with Celegorm’s help. We all do what we can.”

Their _can_ isn’t very much, but Maitimo need not concern himself with that. Not yet. He has many other things to learn first, and a body to heal.

Caranthir doesn’t ask to see the wounds—Maitimo has never been any good at sharing pain, if it is his own.

“We are fair set with provisions for now,” he says,” though we might be pressed if the winter is bad.” Sighing, he adds, “I’d give a lot for a decent blackberry bush come spring. They do grow out here, you know. Maybe if I can get Celegorm to find me one, I might...”

He trails off.

“Hmm.” Maitimo might be listening, or he might be lost in some memory playing out upon the rough ceiling above. He looks as though he hasn’t eaten a square inch of meat in months, and maybe that’s the case.

_Did they give you soft bread at least? Were you often sick in that place, with no one to comfort you?_

It is very hard, kneeling again by a wounded brother’s side.

Rocky soil rarely produces good harvest, which is why Caranthir goes about it all backwards, not bringing up Athair till after he has established everything else of importance. Still, he has spent enough grief that he can tell Maitimo about the gravesite with as near enough calm as he had passed over the food supplies Fingolfin’s people added to Mithrim’s stores.

“If you like, I can take you there when you are able to walk. Or Celegorm can,” he finishes, not pausing to consider why he doesn’t suggest Maglor. Celegorm just has very broad shoulders, and he has made good use of them before.

Maitimo nods a fraction. “Good,” he says, and that is all.

Fingon returns with a kettle of steam, Maitimo closes his eyes again, and nobody but Fingolfin drinks the tea.

Caranthir takes out his beads.

It has been an age since the strung red-glazed clay has given him any solid comfort. This morning, the very thought of the rosary prayers is a little revolting, or rather he revolts against the memory of his own weakness. He knows now that the days he spent trifling in the vegetable garden, mending his brothers’ shirts, or scraping his hands up and down the ridges of a metal washboard, struggling to say even one Hail Mary out of fifty—cruel men spent those days plucking out every stitch of Maitimo. They took him from his family, they beat him like they _hated_ him.

Caranthir doesn’t understand how anyone could hate Maitimo—even Curufin, with his spiteful lizard tongue, does not—but here he is, with only one hand.

Here he is. Here he is.

God, isn’t that what matters?

“Hail Mary,” he begins, without thinking, “Hail Mary, full of grace—”

Maitimo opens his eyes, looks only at the ceiling.

“That’s not how you begin.” (Voice cornstalk rough, still dry, no tears. Or, if tree-like, it is as hurt and slow as barkskin peeling.)

Caranthir always mixes up the Creed, and the Pater Noster feels a little out of place. He is not prepared to speak it, not in plain English and certainly not in the scraps of Irish still caught in his mind like so many wind-blown linens torn from the line.

“Can’t begin anywhere else,” he says, “but only—only if you don’t mind. I mean, I can leave now, if you’d like to rest. Lord knows the woodpile needs seeing to.”

That sounds wrong, as if visiting Maitimo is a task among tasks, so he begins to apologize. However, Maitimo lifts his hand, ever so briefly, and twitches his head one side to the other. The bruised skin on his cheeks pulls tight.

“I am a little tired,” he says, “but I would not chase you out, Caranthir. Only, do not pray for me.”

Caranthir’s heart swells like it is but of ten years’ beating, and he sinks to the side a little, so that his head leans against the bedside, so that one wrist is pressed against the smooth wood frame. He lasted until now without having to blink tears away—they sting like sawdust has settled in them.

“We have you back already, Maitimo,” he says. “Don’t need anything else on that score, but you can’t stop me from wishing for that blackberry bush, or another half-inch so I might catch up to Maglor.”

The sawdust is almost unbearable, and it is getting in his throat

“Don’t pay me anymore mind than you will,” Caranthir adds, voice sand-rough though he tries to gentle it. “If my buzzing grows too loud, just swat me away. I don’t sting.”

So it goes that Maitimo returns to his imitation of the fallen brittle tree, closing his eyes and lying branch-stiff like, all set for more of his limbs to be snapped off, if only anyone made the effort. There are others still in the sickroom, but they do not make their presence felt, and Caranthir, in so far as he thinks of them, thinks of them gratefully. He returns to where he left off, pressing the blood-red rosary beads between his finger and thumb over and over again.

Over and over the thorn-prayers go, and with every word Caranthir proves himself a liar to Maitimo. Maitimo, who has given everything and then some for his brothers—for him Caranthir prays, and sacrifices honesty.

The _Hail Mary...Holy Mary_ , rumbles distantly in his own ears, and maybe it means nothing to his savaged brother upon the bed, maybe Caranthir only grasps at cloud-wisp comfort, maybe he doesn’t know if this moment is the sorrow or the glory, but in this land of exile, he has one good thing returned to him.

It cannot be too late.


End file.
